And the American reaction is not a hard, sustained, creative, above all humane rage.

It is to dive more deeply into our addictions: cheap food and alcohol, for as long as they are available. Psychoactive and illegal drugs, shades of the former Soviet Union. Coarsening, stupefying entertainment, such as Twitter and pornography. Vitriolic politics, whether the anti-Semitism of the left even more than the right; the racism and homophobia of the right; and the blindness to Muslim and Hispanic colonization and the profound misogyny of the left, defending its porn and its prostitution. All displayed, incidentally, on the pages of this blog, which also displays a stunning number of people simply refusing to read what they’re commenting upon.

Whereupon Elephant-in-the-Room promptly wrote: “We’re thinking. We’re also thinking that violent overthrow is a great way to get M1 tank tracks and bullet holes all over that cheap shirt we need to keep clean for our job interviews.” As if revolutionary violence (which I do not advocate because I know its horrors) is the only option.

I will be 44 in October, which means I am old enough to remember the old Soviet Union (along with its astonishly peaceful demise). In fact, way back in the day, I wrote a senior high school paper on the Soviet abuse of psychoactive drugs to silence dissidents. To those dissidents, freedom of speech meant freedom to write necessary things: in poetry, in prose, in nonfiction. In America, freedom of speech has long meant pornography, a multi-billion dollar industry that not only depends upon incest and rape and torture required to make and keep women prostitutes, it also provides a profit motive for those crimes. Now freedom of speech also means corporate participation in the electoral process, dog-fighting videos and people lying about their military service. This is the legal meaning of America’s once vaunted First Amendment. The popular meaning of the first Amendment is that is the freedom to say anything, so long as it is neither beautiful or meaningful.

America has chosen to medicalize normal human emotions and conditions. The Centers for Disease Control inform us with a straight face that “In 2001-2002, an estimated 16% of noninstitutionalized adults had a major depressive disorder at some point in their lifetime, with 7% having had a major depressive episode during the 12 months prior to interview. The detrimental effects of depressive symptoms on quality of life and daily functioning have been estimated to equal or exceed those of heart disease and exceed those of diabetes, arthritis, and gastrointestinal disorders. Access to both accurate diagnosis and appropriate treatment of depression is necessary to combat this prevalent and debilitating disease.”

Are they kidding?

Thomas Szasz is an eighty-something psychiatrist who, for half a century, has been trying to tell us that “mental illness” is both a metaphor used to control people and, in many cases, a “game” chosen by the “mentally ill.” He once demonstrated the power of diagnosis, of labeling, to his students by describing a person, a woman, with her problems and troubles. Then he offered his students a choice. They could describe her as depressed and medicate her to better conform to social expectations. Or they could acknowledge her human unhappiness and need for contact with other human beings. Szasz was not saying that mental pain was not real. He was saying that mental pain-or human depravity and cruelty-cannot be treated with drugs or medicated away. At least, not routinely, in order to avoid deeper issues. Existential anguish is not a broken arm or even a bad back. And if we describe the suicidal as depressed, then it means we do not have to take seriously the fact that suicide often looks a lot like a refusal to participate in one’s own degradation, when effective self-defense is impossible. If we describe as mad our many homeless, we do not face the fact that some of them have no outlet for their very real energy and creativity, are not permitted to use their capabilities to make a living, although we are buried in expensive garbage, be it electronic toys or “entertainment.”

Science and common sense tell us that we do not live in the abstract. We are creatures of our time and place. As the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset once put it, “We are what the world invites us to be.” The sad truth is that, despite all the incessant invocation of America as the Land of Everything Good, the American Way of Life has come to be disgusting. It invites us to be trash.

And we know it.

We the People were once citizens of a genuinely great Republic-and were treated as such by the institutions of that Republic. In our lifetimes, however, we have seen our nation-and the overwhelming majority of people in this country-deliberately impoverished in material welfare and in soul. We have come to be regarded as vehicles for consumption and wage slaves, whether at the bottom of the pyramid or in the middle. Whatever problems we have, the answer is always the same. Consume something. We are encouraged thus because there is profit in rendering us thus. Including the billions to be made peddling psychoactive drugs.

If we have been sexually assaulted or abused, we are offered pills. If we have participated in combat, especially in a war that makes no strategic sense and is widely ignored by the general population, we have other pills. If we are blindsided by a divorce or tormented by a vicious ex, or devastated by the death of a beloved spouse, we have pills. If our jobs have been exported or our hours cut to make rich people richer, we also get pills: at least as long as we have health insurance and sometimes even after because it wouldn’t do to go on a shooting spree, mostly because it’s not possible to shoot the people to blame. If we are just plain anxious about our lives in what America today has become, because deep down we know life is not supposed to be like this, and worried about the fate of our nation and our children, we also have pills.

The simple fact of the matter is that the old Soviet Union drugged its dissidents because they wanted to be free. Americans take psychoactive drugs to hide from themselves the fact that they do not want to be free. Nor do Americans want to be intelligent or educated: today, the book contracts and the TV shows go to criminals and whore-mongers and whores, the scandalous and the shameless.

The anger, the justified anger-over the hideously predatory and suicidal thing that is American capitalism, the horrifyingly mismanaged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the sheer wastage of the Defense budget, the fact that Americans are expendable to their own government-is not the issue.

The issue is that Americans across the political spectrum, are largely stupid and largely also content to be stupid. By stupid, I mean neither ignorant nor unthinking, I mean the willful refusal to know and to think. For example about the connection between “globalization” (i.e., the exportation of American industries and the importation of aliens, legal and illegal) and America’s poverty. Stupid about the fact that guns and gay people, religious and racial issues are used, often by rich whites, to inflame poor whites in particular, into ignoring their best interests. (Think the Tea Party. Think Jim Crow south. Think the segregated north. Also think the resolute refusal of the feminist movement to encourage feminist women to enter the military and paramilitary professions or advocate armed self-defense by women in grave danger.) Think about the people who complain about benefits for the poor and unemployed–or those poor and unemployed who refuse to buy themselves such reasonable pleasures as coffee or soda with their benefit money–then stare at you in stunned, silent bewilderment when you discuss the appalling monstrosity that is the Defense budget. (Every single aircraft procurement program is a wreck and our space program is dead. So is every other major procurement program, but America used to own air and space power.)

Stupid people can be manipulated, especially when they are angry. Smart, thoughtful people are hard to manipulate, even when angry. It’s as simple as that.

Which brings me, as I wrote in a speech I gave three and a half years ago, when I was far more hopeful woman, at Tulane University (and for whatever reason never posted here):

[T]o the subject of protest.

I opposed this war [in Iraq; as of this writing, I now oppose the war in Afghanistan] from before the beginning, as did [my husband, the writer] Philip [Gold], because we could count troops and costs, and because we could read a map. We opposed it because we knew you can’t force people to be free and should not try to turn the world into 6 billion good little American knock-offs. But we had nowhere to go. We were among the original signatories of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, an early DC-based group of academics and policy people. We left when we realized that it had become an op-ed placement and interview-booking service, not a serious force. But we could find no home anywhere else because what protest there was, and has been of late, is still far too much of a carnival superimposed on a tragedy. It is a style of protest that, whatever gratifications it provides its practitioners, alienates many, many more. What we need, desperately, is a protest movement that speaks to citizens as citizens, calmly and with reason and respect.

Can it be that so much of what passes for protest today, protest in the manner of decades past, in fact plays into the hands of the administration and its ever-eager-for-more neocon warmongers? It’s not easy to suggest that people such as Cindy Sheehan and Jane Fonda and others are serving as Karl Rove’s “useful idiots,” making themselves and their style and behavior the issue and thereby deflecting time and energy from the hard work of ending this war and preventing the next one. It is certainly not too much to suggest that Karl Rove’s worst nightmare is a million modestly-attired, well-behaved serious citizens on the Mall, and millions more around the country, all saying:

“You have wrecked Iraq and we want it to stop. You have wrecked our Army and we want it back. You have impoverished our nation in a delusional war.”

A war we are going to be paying on for a long time to come, and as any economist will tell you, the true cost of anything is all the opportunities foregone.

We need millions of Americans, neatly dressed, behaving and speaking with dignity and purpose, converging upon the White House and every state capitol in the country, with a single message. “You have wrecked America and we want it to stop. We want an economy that works for the bottom 99% of this country.”

To the extent that Americans refuse to make such protests happen, to the extent that they indulge in the vitriol and hissy-fitting that was so in evidence wherever we look these days, they deserve what is happening to them.

America doesn’t, those who try to behave with as much grace and dignity as possible don’t–but they do. And they will take the country and their worthy compatriots down with them.